With every recent year seemingly featuring multiple once in a century weather events, power grids have been constantly placed under new and different pressures, according to Power magazine. In attempting to ensure robustness and continuity, power providers and utilities are working aggressively to:
- Engage in active preparations for known events – appropriate teams are deployed to potential disaster areas, with sufficient equipment to immediately begin restoring power and repairing infrastructure.
- Develop best practices in advance of disasters – work to harden existing infrastructure in anticipation of the most common types of events, and engage in active training for response to those events.
- Incorporate data from all sources – consider the availability of weather data for events like lightning strikes, to assist in deployment of resources.
- Revise damage models – incorporate information from previous events to better understand the types and severity of damage, and identify key regions and structures at greatest risk.
“To restore critical infrastructure, reliable power is a must. One underestimated area of destruction that presents a major barrier to recovery is [a] widespread power outage,” president and CEO of PW Power Systems Raul Pereda told Power magazine. “Power reliability is a basic need for disaster-affected communities, right alongside medical care, water, and food. Governments and municipal authorities can put proactive plans in place to ensure power infrastructure is restored with minimal down time so that citizens are not left in the dark.”
Source:
http://www.powermag.com/disaster-response-how-power-generators-prepare-to-weather-the-storm-2/
